nohup is good, but I would also sugest the most excellent program screen for running your cmds in a remote terminal or wanting to close a term and leave stuff running. Screen is great for coding on remote servers becasue you can detach/reattach to your remote session without loosing anything ( like if you on dialup adn you are writing code on a server and loose connection you can reconnect and re=attach to your screen session)

example:
ssh foo
foo> screen
foo> cat /dev/zero&
bunches of zeros!
foo> screen -d OR close xterm

new term:
> ssh foo
foo> screen -d -RR bunches of zeros! from original session

Screen is a virtual Terminal it rocks and It's one othe those programs that after you start using it you wonder how you ever lived without it! ( I sure do! ). Other great thing is mutiple virtual terminals in a single term (C-a c, C-a n)

if you are gonna fork then I would reccomend a nice module called Parallel::ForkManager

enjoy!